Creative LEADERSHIP

We’re here for a reason. I believe a bit of the reason is to throw little torches out to lead people through the dark.
—Whoopi Goldberg

The ALLIANCE′s arts leadership programs support and develop new creative thinkers and arts leaders.

Find out what happened at the 2016 Leadership Lab!

The Creative Leadership Lab at Sundance

The The ALLIANCE National Leadership Institute, now in its sixteenth year, has served the field by providing a transformative experience and safe space for both emerging and veteran arts leaders to disconnect from day-to-day routines, connect with core values, and combine relevant leadership theory with hands-on practice in a context of mutual learning and peer support.

On Monday July 11 – Thursday July 14, 2016.The National Leadership Institute will relaunch as the The ALLIANCE Creative Leadership Lab and moves operations to the Redford Center at the Sundance Resort and Conference Center. We are excited to announce a new partnership with facilitator Gibran Rivera from the Interaction Institute for Social Change and an intentional focus on creative vision, collective impact and collaboration.

Sixteen media and visual arts leaders will be invited to join with an inspiring group of mentors and advisors at Sundance to explore our capacity for true leadership from a creative perspective, break through the barriers that impede our ability to listen, lead and effect change, and build a network of relationships that can nurture individual artists, bolster organizations and catalyze social movements. More information about the program and applications for the Lab will be available February 15. You must be a The ALLIANCE member to apply.

Program Background

For the last 16 years, the The ALLIANCE National Leadership Institute has successfully developed and encouraged visionary, intergenerational leadership in the arts. Leveraging the past, addressing the current needs of the field, and looking towards a sustainable future — the The ALLIANCE National Leadership Institute will re-launch as the The ALLIANCE Creative Leadership Lab in Monday July 11 – Thursday July 14, 2016.. We think the idea of a Lab communicates a hands-on participatory experience, a vibrant creative collaboration and the spirit of experimentation and risk. We have infused the program with new approaches and fresh perspectives, but the goals are the same – to seed a an intergenerational community of artists and arts leaders with dynamic strategies and tools to connect more deeply with audiences, communities and each other, and to effectively demonstrate and celebrate the power of the arts as an engine of personal, social and cultural transformation.

Let’s do this.

What is The Creative Leadership Lab?

The The ALLIANCE Creative Leadership Lab is an intensive four-day residency for 18 arts leaders that will take place at the Sundance Resort on Monday July 11 – Thursday July 14, 2016.. The Lab will be an immersive experience and safe space for mid-career and veteran arts leaders to identify and excavate the challenges and obstacles to visionary creative leadership, explore practical approaches to collaboration, innovation and resilience, share strategies for collective impact, and find inspiration and support in a responsive peer network. In collaboration with Interaction Institute for Social Change facilitator Gibran Rivera, the The ALLIANCE Creative Leadership Lab advisor/mentor team includes Executive Director Wendy Levy, Race Forward’s Melinda Weekes, Macky Alston from Auburn Seminary and Leadership Institute Director Paula Manley from Learning Commons. After the Lab, peer coaching and leadership circles will be available for all participants, along with opportunities to develop and lead core programs at the next The ALLIANCE National Conference.

What are the Costs?

Thanks to generous support from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Warhol Foundation, if you are invited to the Lab, all costs are covered. This includes transportation to the Sundance Resort, catered meals and beautiful private accommodations. We ask that nonprofit organizations cover fulltime staff salaries during the Lab, and if possible, that all participants are members of The ALLIANCE. But no one will be turned away for lack of funds.

Who Should Apply?

The Lab is designed for artists and arts administrators who are in positions of leadership within nonprofit organizations, arts collectives, and arts and culture institutions, or unaffiliated artists who serve as leaders for local or digital creative communities. The Lab is geared towards experienced and emerging staff leaders at all levels, especially those interested in creating more sustainable, multi-generational and multicultural organizations. This includes (but is not limited to):

  • • Executives and Managers
  • • Program Coordinators
  • • Educators and Outreach Associates
  • • Communications Strategists and Online Community Managers
  • • Development Officers
  • • Curators and Programmers
  • • Teaching Artists

The ALLIANCE seeks to identify a diverse group of participants who represent a mix of mid-career and established leaders nationally. We will select a cohort who we feel will benefit the most from the Lab experience, who are willing to collaborate, who are open to rigorous exploration of new ideas, and who have the potential to contribute significantly to advancing the arts field. There will be a mix of leaders from media arts, visual arts and related disciplines.

Meet the 2016 ALLIANCE Creative Leaders

Imani Jacqueline Brown

Imani Jacqueline Brown

Imani Jacqueline Brown is an activist, cultural organizer, and Director of Programs at Antenna, New Orleans. In 2014, Imani co-founded Blights Out, a collective of citizens, artists, architects, and activists daring to design a new model for development that creates art and action to impact issues of blight, gentrification, and housing affordability. She is a member of Occupy Museums, an international artist/activist collective formed in 2011 during Occupy Wall Street to challenge and deconstruct the commodification of art and culture.
Andrew DeVigal

Andrew DeVigal

Andrew DeVigal is the inaugural Chair in Journalism Innovation and Civic Engagement and the first professor of practice at the University of Oregon's School of Journalism and Communication (SOJC). The Agora Journalism Center is devoted to transformative advancements for better journalism and stronger democracy. DeVigal also served as the multimedia editor at The New York Times, where he helped guide the newspaper’s print-driven format into the multimedia era.
Vashti DuBois

Vashti DuBois

Vashti Dubois currently serves as the Executive Director and Founder of a new institution The Colored Girls Museum, which focuses on celebrating the achievements and perspectives of the Ordinary Extraordinary Colored Girl. Headquartered in Historic Germantown this living museum has been engineered to pop up in other cities and neighborhoods around the country—transforming ordinary spaces into A Colored Girls Museum outpost which collect, archive, and share the stories of indigenous colored girls in that place.
Mirasol Enriquez

Mirasol Enriquez

Mirasol Enriquez is a film and media scholar, video editor, educator, and cultural worker who has devoted her career to community building through film and the other arts. She is currently the Director of Community Media at the Austin Film Society, where she oversees the organization’s education programs and Austin Public, the community media center AFS manages for the city of Austin.
Erica Ginsberg

Erica Ginsberg

Erica Ginsberg is Co-Founder and Executive Director of Docs In Progress, a nonprofit incubator which has helped more than 1000 emerging documentary filmmakers in the Washington DC area and beyond. She is also co-host of The D-Word, an online documentary filmmaker community with more than 10,000 members from around the world.
Emily Keating

Emily Keating

As Director of Education at the Jacob Burns Film Center, Emily Keating has overseen the development, implementation, and expansion of the education programs since their inception in 2001. The education programs are achieving national impact, equipping and inspiring nearly 15,000 students a year to communicate in the language of our visual culture: image, sound, and story.
Ingrid Lee

Ingrid Lee

Ingrid Lee works on a digital journalism-filmmaker initiative at ITVS, bringing diverse, consequential domestic and international stories to media partners like The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Salon, and others. Prior to public media, previous work included managing international projects around health, gender, and environment for the UN and World Bank.
Zun Lee

Zun Lee

Zun Lee is an award-winning Canadian photographer, physician and educator. He was born and raised in Germany and has also lived in Atlanta, Philadelphia and Chicago. He currently resides in Toronto. He has been published in the New York Times, Slate, Wall Street Journal, TIME, The New Yorker, MSNBC, Washington Post, Forbes, and Hyperallergic.
Natasha Logan

Natasha Logan

Natasha L. Logan is a multi-media arts and cultural producer based in Brooklyn, NY. Natasha recently joined Creative Time as the Project Manager, and is committed todeveloping projects that encourage public participation, incorporate interactive technology, and unite communities. Recent productions include include the transmedia projects Question Bridge: Black Male and The Truth Booth with Hank Willis Thomas and The Cause Collective.
Carrie Lozano

Carrie Lozano

Carrie Lozano is an award winning documentary filmmaker and journalist. She is currently an editorial consultant for independent documentary filmmakers, facilitates the Bay Area Video Coalition’s National MediaMaker Fellowship, and is consulting with the International Documentary Association to help identify ways to support filmmakers working in the journalism space.
Lansana ‘Barmmy Boy’ Mansaray

Lansana ‘Barmmy Boy’ Mansaray

Lansana ‘Barmmy Boy’ Mansaray is a multi-talented director of photography, filmmaker and musician who lives in Freetown, Sierra Leone. Barmmy is a founding member and the production manager of the WeOwnTV Freetown Media Center. He is the Producer/Director of photography for Survivors, a feature length documentary about the Ebola outbreak currently in production.
Jane Chang Mi

Jane Chang Mi

Trained as an ocean engineer and an artist, Jane Chang Mi considers land politics and postcolonial ecologies. Exploring the traditions and narratives associated with environment through her interdisciplinary and research-based work, she utilizes art to work through these multi-layered and complex subjects.
Andrew J. Padilla

Andrew J. Padilla

Andrew J. Padilla is an award-winning filmmaker, educator and independent journalist, born and raised in East Harlem, NYC. He is currently profiling displacement in America through a series of documentary shorts entitled “El Barrio Tours: Gentrification USA”. From Hostos to Harvard, Andrew has lectured on urban politics across the US. His writing has been featured in NPR Latino, City Limits, Latino Rebels and La Respuesta.
Donnie Smith

Donnie Smith

Donnie Nicole Smith started her professional career over 10 years ago as a teacher in the Chicago Public School System. Donnie is the Executive Director of Donda’s House Inc., a nonprofit organization she co-founded with Kanye West and her husband, Che “Rhymefest” Smith. Donda’s House provides free access to the arts for youth.
Jenni Wolfson

Jenni Wolfson

Jenni Wolfson is the Executive Director of Chicken & Egg Pictures, which supports women non-fiction filmmakers whose artful and innovate storytelling catalyzes social change. Jenni was previously the Managing Director of WITNESS, the international human rights video advocacy organization co-founded by musician Peter Gabriel.
Jason Wyman

Jason Wyman

Jason Wyman is many things. They are an artist that uses all the tools available -- photography, video, interviews, social media, sound, design, illustration, mobile media -- to create visual works that reveal layers, connections, and perspectives. They are a writer examining truths and myths through fables, poetry, and parallel observations.They are a performer crafting multi-media experiences that dance between light and dark, despair and hope, reality and possibility. They are a curator filling white walls and empty spaces with the voices and visions of community, emerging, and established artists. They are an educator cultivating environments of peer exchange rooted in creative inquiry and multi-sensory pedagogies.
Yanqing Yang

Yanqing Yang

Yanqing Yang is an anthropologist, cultural organizer, and art educator. She’s a founding team member of China Youthology, a youth culture research and connection platform which aims to empower youth driven change. She initiated Butter Youth Conference, the first youth story sharing platform in China in 2009 and has run more than 50 Butter Youth Conferences with 300+ youth opinion leaders speakers and 2000+ audience members.

2015 ALLIANCE Creative Leaders

Jamiel Alexander

Jamiel Alexander

In his position as Manager of Youth and Family Programs at Crispus Attucks Association, Jamiel for twelve years served and was responsible for a variety of tasks including managing after-school and summer programs, professional and leadership development, youth and family workshops, and various community service projects. Earlier this year, Jamiel’s colleagues on the YouthBuild National Alumni Council elected him as their President. As a Rising Star award recipient in his community, Jamiel currently serves as a committee member for the York City General Authority Commission, NAACP, Ancestors Dream Organization, and Helping Offer Options and Directions, LLC.
Mary T. An

Mary T. An

Mary leads development efforts at American Documentary POV ("Point-of-View"), the Emmy-award winning PBS documentary series with major funding from PBS, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, from private institutions such as the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and from private individuals.
Jade D. Banks

Jade D. Banks

Jade is a writer, book publisher, teaching artist, arts administrator, producer, community folklorist, photographer and author of ON BEING FAT, BLACK AND FEMALE. Founder of Iman Books, she made Harlem history by publishing SIGNIFYIN' HARLEM literary journal (2002-2004), the first literary journal of Harlem artists since the famed Fire!! (1926)—published by Wallace Thurman, Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston.
Katerina Cizek

Katerina Cizek

Katerina is a two-time Emmy-winning, internationally recognized leader and pioneer in digital media: documentary, interactive and journalism. Her work has documented the Digital Revolution, and has itself become part of the movement. For 20 years, she has worked across many media platforms: digital media, broadcasting (radio and television), print and live presentations/installations.
John Wesley Days, Jr.

John Wesley Days, Jr.

John is an educator, multi-media artist, facilitator, musician, and Brazil Country Director for The Lion Shade Group. His area of expertise includes group process facilitation, intercultural communication and global project management with a focus on mediating manifestations of conflict by creating conditions conducive to uproot its causes over the long term.
Jessica Devaney

Jessica Devaney

Jessica is a producer and communications strategist dedicated to leveraging the power of stories to break stereotypes and challenge structural inequalities. She is the Director of Communications at Just Vision, an organization that creates documentary films and multimedia to support Palestinian and Israeli grassroots efforts to end the occupation and build a future of freedom and equality.
Sean Flynn

Sean Flynn

Sean has worked as a producer, cinematographer, festival programmer, and researcher—always animated by a passion for the documentary form and its continuous evolution. He is currently the Director of the Points North program at Camden International Film Festival, which includes an annual industry forum, fellowship, retreat program, and pitch sessions for documentary filmmakers.
Marlene Graham (a.k.a. Afua Kafi-Akua)

Marlene Graham (a.k.a. Afua Kafi-Akua)

Marlene has worked as a museum professional, media producer, professor, and distribution executive for three decades at many cutting edge organizations including Women Make Movies, The Cinema Guild, Antenna Audio, and Third World Newsreel. She is currently the senior manager of the Uris Education Center and Educational Media at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, an adjunct professor in the Communications department at The College of New Rochelle’s DC37 campus, and a distribution consultant and board member at Third World Newsreel.
Justen Harn

Justen Harn

As Director of Programs and Community Engagement at Portland's Hollywood Theatre, Justen develops innovative media arts programming centered around engagement and access.
Denah Johnston

Denah Johnston

Denah is a teacher, writer, award winning filmmaker, and curator working in San Francisco. Currently the Executive Director of Canyon Cinema Foundation, she guided the organization to attain nonprofit status in 2014.
Jennifer MacArthur

Jennifer MacArthur

Jennifer is a multi-platform communications, distribution and engagement strategist with a focus on social issue documentary. Her background spans nearly 20 years working in radio, film and television, digital media, and publishing.
Abina Manning

Abina Manning

Abina has promoted artists’ film, video and media art in both Europe and the U.S for more than 25 years. Since 1999 she has been with the Video Data Bank, a leading distributor and resource for video and media art located at the Art Institute of Chicago, where she serves as Executive Director.
Stella Aguirre McGregor

Stella Aguirre McGregor

Stella is Founder and Artistic/Executive Director of the Urbano Project, an artist-run studio and exhibition space in Boston, MA. Urbano fosters partnerships between urban teens and professional artists through collaborative works, audience participation, and self-discovery through the artistic process.
Paco de Onís

Paco de Onís

Paco grew up in several Latin American countries during a time of dictatorships. He is the Executive Director and Executive Producer of Skylight, a human rights media organization dedicated to creating documentary films and innovative media tools for long-term strategies to advance social and economic justice.
Rachel Raney

Rachel Raney

Rachel has served as Executive Director of the Southern Documentary Fund since 2011. She is a seasoned non-fiction filmmaker and public TV/radio producer with many years of experience producing content, as well as collaborating with and supporting independent producers.
Jennifer Pritheeva Samuel

Jennifer Pritheeva Samuel

Jennifer is the founder, curator, and producer behind Visionaries, a nomadic series bringing together artists and organizations with a common mission. She is currently producing the talks and workshops for Brooklyn’s outdoor photo festival, Photoville. Until recently, she was the Associate Director of Anastasia Photo, a gallery specializing in documentary photography and photojournalism.
Scott Shigeoka

Scott Shigeoka

Scott is an experience designer and storyteller focused on co-creating resilient and sustainable communities. He is originally from Hawaii but recently moved to Iceland to found Saga Fest, a transformative music and arts festival that brought artists, workshop facilitators, and festival-goers from more than 16 countries to a small and sustainable farm in southern Iceland.
Bill Simmon

Bill Simmon

Bill is a filmmaker, writer, and media educator living in northern Vermont. He’s the Director of Media Services at VCAM—a nonprofit media center in Burlington, Vermont—where he trains local citizens in the tools and techniques of digital video production and postproduction. He also teaches film production and editing at Vermont colleges.
Emily Verellen

Emily Verellen

In her role as the Senior Director of Programs at The Fledgling Fund, Emily identifies creative projects with the most impact potential to support through grants and in-kind resources. She then works with these filmmakers and digital storytellers—providing strategy consulting, making introductions and connections and supporting the filmmaker’s often-evolving social good vision.

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